Finding a Cure for CIO Pain

Modern Chief Information Officers (CIOs) face three key challenges
that can often conflict with each other, making the position a fairly stressful
one for even the most experienced executive.
CIOs and all other IT leaders must simultaneously arm their enterprise
with the tools to meet the diverse demands of modern business, enable the
datacenter to quickly adapt as these demands change and keep costs in
check while managing the first two challenges.

The Primary Data DataSphere platform overcomes each of these
hurdles with unique technology that eliminates the problem instead of just
masking the symptom. Let’s take a look at each of these challenges to see how.

Meeting Diverse Data Demands

The diverse data needs of today’s businesses create an
ongoing challenge for today’s CIOs. Rapid data growth and new ways to use data
have spurred a wave of innovation on many fronts. Technologies like flash, as
well as emerging innovations like phase-change memory, answer the need for ever-faster
response times. Advances like web-scale architectures give enterprises the
ability to scale performance and capacity quickly, while analytics platforms
give businesses fast and actionable insight. Object and cloud storage products
are reducing costs to store data that isn’t actively used, but also isn’t
deleted.

Although each of these storage types and platforms offer
numerous different benefits, they are also silos that trap data, and therefore must be
managed separately. Entire technology categories are being created to address
the problems that storage silos create. For example, copy data management
solutions aim to reduce the cost of storing multiple copies of data across
secondary storage. Chris Mellor, in a recent
article for The Register, calls these solutions “silo-melding.”

However, these approaches only partially address the
storage silo problem. Copy data
management (CDM) solutions often create a single bigger silo by consolidating many
secondary storage silos. But the primary silos remain, so the enterprise still
has to manage its primary silos, along with the new, larger secondary silo. Indeed,
some copy data management solutions only “meld silos” for the purpose of disaster
recovery, or DR. In addition, CDM
solutions often combine the control path and the data path, reducing the
performance and scalability potential of these technologies.

DataSphere tackles the problem of maintaining multiple
separate storage systems by eliminating storage silos altogether. DataSphere enables a single, global dataspace that allows data to be placed on the right storage,
at the right place, at the right time, across all primary or secondary storage
systems, from flash to SAN and NAS storage to the cloud. DataSphere also delivers high performance and massive
scalability by placing the control path out-of-band of the data path. Doing
this accelerates control operations by enabling them to run on a dedicated
server, while accelerating data access by freeing the data path from the
congestion of metadata operations.

Achieving Acrobatic Agility

It is crucial for enterprises to have agile datacenters that
can adapt quickly as data demands change. This can be a huge challenge for a
new CIO who has inherited legacy infrastructure.

Silos are a root cause of datacenter inflexibility. Whether
data is being promoted from development into production, upgraded to a higher
performance storage system to support new workloads, or retired to more
cost-effective storage, the process of moving data between storage types without
affecting business is expensive, time-consuming and laborious.

A number of new solution categories have emerged to address symptoms
of inflexibility without tackling the origin of the problem. For example, hyperconverged
systems aim to meet changing data needs through automatic tiering and centralized
management. As hyperconverged systems frequently require proprietary hardware, this
limits customer choice and increases costs, and adds just another larger silo
for enterprises to manage. Hyperconverged systems also typically combine the control
path and the data path, which limits scalability too much for many enterprise use
cases.

DataSphere improves datacenter agility by placing data across
different storage types as needs change. And this mobility can happen automatically with policies based on Smart
Objectives. For example, data that is hot or
cold, or that matches a particular file type, can be automatically moved to
higher or lower performance storage, without disruption to business operations.

DataSphere also offers visibility into the
actual application experience. This makes it possible for policies to be
expressed in terms that application owners understand. It also enables IT
professionals to craft policies that are based on how the data infrastructure
as a whole is affecting the application, as opposed to, say, the bandwidth the
storage device is delivering up until the data hits the network. When these
actions happen automatically, expensive data migrations become history, and IT
can focus on other strategic tasks that add more value to the business.

Reducing Costs by Increasing Infrastructure Utilization

The cost to support the data sprawl that results from
growing and maintaining an enterprise of different storage systems is enormous.
Indeed, for many companies, it’s becoming unsustainable. Solutions that do not solve the storage silo problem
cannot effectively slow the sprawl and reduce datacenter costs. In fact, since
many of these solutions are deployed on proprietary hardware, many enterprises
might find costs actually increase.

DataSphere objectives protect the end user experience while
greatly reducing datacenter costs. Most data access follows the Pareto principle,
meaning 20% of the data
attracts up to 80% of the access. DataSphere frees significant capacity
from the enterprise’s most expensive and often most overprovisioned storage resources
to deliver an immediate ROI. DataSphere also dramatically cuts operating costs,
including IT overhead for upgrades and migrations, as well as datacenter
footprint to reduce power and floor space requirements. In addition,
DataSphere’s storage-agnostic architecture ensures enterprises the flexibility
to choose the best storage, at the right price point, when it is actually
needed. Finally, DataSphere delivers linear scaling of performance and
capacity, which makes future growth predictable and easier to budget.

Sayonara, Silos

DataSphere solves one of the primary sources of pain in the modern
datacenter by eliminating the longstanding problem of storage silos. It ensures
that enterprises can meet diverse business demands by automating data movement as business needs evolve, placing data on the right storage for its
needs based on its actual usage. By eliminating the need to maintain separate
storage silos, enterprises can greatly improve datacenter resource utilization
to dramatically reduce capital and operating costs, finally making it possible
for CIOs to overcome today’s daunting challenges with their existing storage
while saving budget to support future growth.